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Every Tuesday, HR at a 50-location restaurant HoldCo loaned a body to Finance.

For a “special project” AKA data entry.

Someone whose actual job was people spent one full day every week zooming in on photos of register receipts. They came in via text, email, and WhatsApp from 50+ store managers. Some were blurry. Some were coffee-stained. All of them had to be manually typed into a spreadsheet so the finance team could close the week.

They called it "Receipt Tuesdays."

It was just one of half a dozen speed bumps (approvals, verifications, reconciliations) that added up to a 30-day lag. The holdco wouldn’t know a store was bleeding cash until a month after the wound opened.

A buddy of mine bought a manufacturing biz (we’ll call it Western Siding) with the same problem. They were doing millions in revenue, but their sales team worked on paper while their production team worked off the ERP.

They lost over $60,000 in a year on unsigned change orders. A client would change the specs, but the install team never saw it. They shipped the wrong specs. The client refused to pay. The money vanished.

These are physics problems, not tech issues

You have been sold a lie about how operations improve.

It says that if you put in 10 units of effort, you get 10 units of improvement. You fix the receipt process, receipts get better. You fix the change orders, change orders get better.

But you’ve lived the whack-a-mole reality. You fix the receipts, and it works for receipts. But now you’ve exposed that the scheduling data is garbage because it was relying on the old manual entry. You fix the scheduling, and now P&L reporting breaks.

At the end of the year you’ve shipped twelve improvements, but the company feels exactly as chaotic as it did in January.

That’s not failure. That’s thermodynamics.

Most companies never escape the thermodynamics of their problems. They think they just need to push harder and give up on untangling the web.

But there is a phase transition where the physics flip. Think of water turning to steam. You add heat, add heat, add heat, and the water sits there unchanged. It’s getting hotter, but not yet hot enough. Then it reaches its boiling point and the behavior changes instantly.

Everything before the phase change is just adding heat. Everything after it powers the steam engine.

The tipping point isn't a piece of software. It’s deciding to build a new road instead of adding another speed bump..

For the QSR franchise, that was when we killed Receipt Tuesdays. We set up a dedicated drive to upload the receipts, OCR to read the numbers, an automation to put it in the spreadsheet, and a human-in-the-loop (finance, not HR) to review before clicking "Approve."

Suddenly, the data flowed from the store to the ledger every day.

You solve one problem to find two more. But now? A fix in receipt data automatically flows through to the reporting because it was pulling from the same clean daily P&Ls.

Receipt Tuesdays disappeared. The 30-day lag collapsed to 24 hours. The finance team reclaimed 20 hours a week and HR another 6.

Before the phase change, you pay full price for every inch of progress. After, your snowball compounds.

Standardization stops the gaslighting.

When Western Siding’s teams were disconnected, they spent 50% of every meeting arguing about whose spreadsheet was right. You feel crazy because the numbers never match reality. Once we connected the CRM to the production tools, the arguments stopped. The truth was no longer debate, it had become a dashboard.

Trust kills the verification tax

How many people are you paying to check other people’s work? That QSR franchise was paying a tax every Tuesday. When the system becomes trustworthy, the taxes disappear. They saw a 90% reduction in manual work. HR went back to hiring. You don't need to hire more people to get more done if they can trust the process and systems you put in place.

Free people fix their own problems

When your team works on their work, their behavior changes. They stop hoarding data. They start asking, "Hey, why don't we do this for inventory too?" The flywheel starts pulling them. We saw this with another client in digital marketing. They were drowning in disconnected software silos. We cut half and integrated the rest.

They didn't just save money on subscriptions, they increased their capacity. Over the next year the business doubled and headcount stayed the same. Steam can expand and compress in ways water cannot, the had crossed the boiling point.

This is obvious, so why do companies stall before the tipping point?

They try to cheat the physics.

Western Siding’s $60,000 in unsigned change orders? That would have been $200,000 if they automated sales before integrating their ERP.

Automation doesn't make you smarter, it just makes you faster. If your process is broken, automation just helps you make mistakes at the speed of light.

They were trying to get the compound interest without the principal investment. We had to tear it down. We mapped the "people" layer first (who owns the data?), then the process (how does a contract move?), and only then applied the tools.

You don't need a consultant or a maturity assessment to tell you if you're a solid, liquid, or gas.

You just need to answer one question.

Do your fixes fix other things? Or do they just reveal more things to fix?

If it’s #2, you aren’t off course. You’re just fighting thermodynamics. You are adding heat but you haven't hit 100 degrees yet.

Find the Receipt Tuesday of your business, unwind the issues, and fix it.

Then watch the physics change.

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